(page 16) January 2013
beyond borders with mark lloyd
Borders went bankrupt? So what. That doesn’t stop former employee Mark Lloyd from finding out what’s the next hottest read.
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
What to watch for in January
From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel by Alex Gilvarry
This is the story of a Filipino immigrant who was a fashion designer before he was detained for being linked to a terrorist plot. Now he is locked up in Guantanamo. I hope there is a scene where he puts on a fashion show with actual terrorists. That sounds fun.
The Reenactments: A Memoir by Nick Flynn
We’ve all played that game where we cast the movie of our life. I’m pretty sure Brad Pitt would play me. Anyway, Nick Flynn got to witness the casting of his life firsthand. The movie “Being Flynn” is about his life, and this memoir is about that experience.
So, this is one of those postapocalyptic stories. It’s one of those stories where almost everyone is dead. But there aren’t any zombies, and there aren’t any terminators or anything. There is Hig. Hig lost everything. His whole family died of the flu that killed almost everyone. Hig lives at an old airport with his dog Jasper. He’s got a little plot of land where he grows lettuce and green beans. He goes fishing, but all the trout are dead, too. He just catches little carp and thinks about the past. His only neighbor is Bangley. Bangley lives in an abandoned house at the end of the runway. Bangley is what you might call a survivalist. It seems like Bangley is actually happy with the postapocalyptic world. Hig and Bangley have what you might call a symbiotic relationship. Bangley likes to shoot anybody who breaches the perimeter, and Hig can fly a plane. So Hig goes out in his plane and
scouts the perimeter with Jasper the dog as his copilot. He’s got a little Cessna Aircraft and enough gas to last him for a long time considering that he may be the only pilot with a plane left in the world. And when people do wander up to the little airport, Bangley will let them get curious about who lives at the airport before lining them up with one of his array of weapons and mowing them down. Bangley has all sorts of weapons, ranging from sniper rifles to assault rifles to a mortar launcher. Bangley likes to mix it up. This bothers Hig, but he’s pretty sure that Bangley is the only thing that has kept him alive. He’s also pretty sure that if he couldn’t fly, Bangley would have killed him also. Then one day while Hig is flying, he picks up a garbled radio transmission. And maybe there is more to this world than surviving.
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